Bobo and Krugman

Bobo, in “Chinese Fireworks Display,” says when contemplating the United States and its future, it’s impossible not to think about America’s role in the world and its relationship with China.  Duh.  Prof. Krugman, in “That 30s Show,” asks failing to learn from history mean we are doomed to repeat it? Not necessarily, but it’s up to Washington to ensure that 1937 doesn’t happen all over again.  Here’s Bobo:

On July Fourth, we think about our country and its future. But these days it’s impossible to think about America and its future role in the world without also thinking about China. This was the subject of a combative discussion this week at the Aspen Ideas Festival.

The agent provocateur was Niall Ferguson of Harvard. China and the U.S., he argued, used to have a symbiotic relationship and formed a tightly integrated unit that he calls Chimerica.

In this unit, China did the making, and the United States did the buying. China did the saving, while the U.S. did the spending. Between 1995 and 2005, the U.S. savings rate declined from about 5 percent to zero, while the Chinese savings rate rose from 30 percent to nearly 45 percent.

This savings diversion allowed the Chinese to plow huge amounts of capital into the U.S. and dollar-denominated assets. Cheap Chinese labor kept American inflation low. Chinese efforts to keep the renminbi from appreciating against the dollar kept our currency strong and allowed us to borrow at low interest rates.

During the first few years of the 21st century, Chimerica worked great. This unit accounted for about a quarter of the world’s G.D.P. and for about half of global growth. But a marriage in which one partner does all the saving and the other partner does all the spending is not going to last.

The frictions are building and will lead to divorce, conflict and potential catastrophe. China, Ferguson argued, is now decoupling from the United States. Chinese business leaders assume that American consumers will never again go on a spending binge. The Chinese are developing an economy that relies more on internal consumption.

Chinese officials are also aware that the U.S. will never get its fiscal house in order. There may be theoretical plans to reduce the federal deficit and the national debt, but there is no politically practical way to get there. Depreciation is inevitable and the Chinese are working to end the dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency.

Chinese nationalism is also on the rise. The Internet has made young Chinese more nationalistic. The Chinese are acquiring resources all around the world and with them, willy-nilly, an overseas empire that threatens U.S. interests. The Chinese are building their Navy, a historic precursor to expanded ambitions and global conflict.

Think of China, Ferguson concluded, as Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany in the years before World War I: a growing, aggressive, nationalistic power whose ambitions will tear through pre-existing commercial ties and historic friendships.

James Fallows of The Atlantic has lived in China for the past three years. He agreed with parts of Ferguson’s take on the economic fundamentals, but seemed to regard Ferguson’s analysis of the Chinese psychology as airy-fairy academic theorizing. At one point, while Fallows was defending Chinese intentions, Ferguson shot back: “You’ve been in China too long.” Fallows responded that there must be a happy medium between being in China too long and being in China too little.

Fallows pointed out that there is no one thing called “China” or “the Chinese,” and that many of the most anti-American statements from Chinese officials are made to blunt domestic anxiety and make further integration possible. That integration, Fallows continued, is deep and will get deeper. Many, many Chinese leaders were educated in the U.S. and admire or at least respect it. If you go to cities like Xian, you find American and European aviation firms fully integrated into the commercial fabric there.

Fallows’s main argument, though, was psychological. When he lived in Japan in the 1980s, he said, he sometimes felt that the Japanese had a chip-on-their-shoulder attitude in which their success was bound to U.S. decline. He says he rarely got that feeling in China. Instead, he has described officials who are thrilled to be integrated in the world. Their mothers had bound feet. They themselves plowed the fields in the Cultural Revolution. Now they get to join the world.

Some of the officials interviewed by Fallows believe the U.S. is following unsustainable fiscal policies that will lead to decline, but they view this with frustration, not joy. Fallows doesn’t know what the future will hold, but he believes that Chinese officials still see the dollar as their least risky investment. Domestically, China will not turn democratic, but individual liberties will expand. He agreed that China and the U.S. will dominate the 21st century, but he painted the picture of a more benign cooperation.

I came to the debate agreeing more with Fallows and left the same way, but I was impressed by how powerfully Ferguson made his case. And I was struck by their agreement about what to do. This conversation, like many conversations these days, gets back to America’s debt. Until the U.S. gets its fiscal house in order, relations with countries like China will be fundamentally insecure.

Now here’s Prof. Krugman:

O.K., Thursday’s jobs report settles it. We’re going to need a bigger stimulus. But does the president know that?

Let’s do the math.

Since the recession began, the U.S. economy has lost 6 ½ million jobs — and as that grim employment report confirmed, it’s continuing to lose jobs at a rapid pace. Once you take into account the 100,000-plus new jobs that we need each month just to keep up with a growing population, we’re about 8 ½ million jobs in the hole.

And the deeper the hole gets, the harder it will be to dig ourselves out. The job figures weren’t the only bad news in Thursday’s report, which also showed wages stalling and possibly on the verge of outright decline. That’s a recipe for a descent into Japanese-style deflation, which is very difficult to reverse. Lost decade, anyone?

Wait — there’s more bad news: the fiscal crisis of the states. Unlike the federal government, states are required to run balanced budgets. And faced with a sharp drop in revenue, most states are preparing savage budget cuts, many of them at the expense of the most vulnerable. Aside from directly creating a great deal of misery, these cuts will depress the economy even further.

So what do we have to counter this scary prospect? We have the Obama stimulus plan, which aims to create 3 ½ million jobs by late next year. That’s much better than nothing, but it’s not remotely enough. And there doesn’t seem to be much else going on. Do you remember the administration’s plan to sharply reduce the rate of foreclosures, or its plan to get the banks lending again by taking toxic assets off their balance sheets? Neither do I.

All of this is depressingly familiar to anyone who has studied economic policy in the 1930s. Once again a Democratic president has pushed through job-creation policies that will mitigate the slump but aren’t aggressive enough to produce a full recovery. Once again much of the stimulus at the federal level is being undone by budget retrenchment at the state and local level.

So have we failed to learn from history, and are we, therefore, doomed to repeat it? Not necessarily — but it’s up to the president and his economic team to ensure that things are different this time. President Obama and his officials need to ramp up their efforts, starting with a plan to make the stimulus bigger.

Just to be clear, I’m well aware of how difficult it will be to get such a plan enacted.

There won’t be any cooperation from Republican leaders, who have settled on a strategy of total opposition, unconstrained by facts or logic. Indeed, these leaders responded to the latest job numbers by proclaiming the failure of the Obama economic plan. That’s ludicrous, of course. The administration warned from the beginning that it would be several quarters before the plan had any major positive effects. But that didn’t stop the chairman of the Republican Study Committee from issuing a statement demanding: “Where are the jobs?”

It’s also not clear whether the administration will get much help from Senate “centrists,” who partially eviscerated the original stimulus plan by demanding cuts in aid to state and local governments — aid that, as we’re now seeing, was desperately needed. I’d like to think that some of these centrists are feeling remorse, but if they are, I haven’t seen any evidence to that effect.

And as an economist, I’d add that many members of my profession are playing a distinctly unhelpful role.

It has been a rude shock to see so many economists with good reputations recycling old fallacies — like the claim that any rise in government spending automatically displaces an equal amount of private spending, even when there is mass unemployment — and lending their names to grossly exaggerated claims about the evils of short-run budget deficits. (Right now the risks associated with additional debt are much less than the risks associated with failing to give the economy adequate support.)

Also, as in the 1930s, the opponents of action are peddling scare stories about inflation even as deflation looms.

So getting another round of stimulus will be difficult. But it’s essential.

Obama administration economists understand the stakes. Indeed, just a few weeks ago, Christina Romer, the chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisers, published an article on the “lessons of 1937” — the year that F.D.R. gave in to the deficit and inflation hawks, with disastrous consequences both for the economy and for his political agenda.

What I don’t know is whether the administration has faced up to the inadequacy of what it has done so far.

So here’s my message to the president: You need to get both your economic team and your political people working on additional stimulus, now. Because if you don’t, you’ll soon be facing your own personal 1937.

Collins and Kristof

Ms. Collins, in “An Affair to Remember,” says the folks in New York were happy to learn that Gov. Mark Sanford has been scheduling his assignations in their state. The airfare is cheaper than it is to Argentina. Plus, you can see “South Pacific.”  Mr. Kristof, in “When Our Brains Short-Circuit,” says we’re brilliantly programmed to act on the risks that confronted us in the Pleistocene Age but less adept with 21st-century challenges like climate change.  Here’s Ms. Collins:

Before everyone finishes piling on Gov. Mark Sanford, let me say that all of us in New York were happy to learn that he has been scheduling his assignations in our state.

Really, times are tough, and we need all the business we can get. Although it is true that our hotels can be somewhat pricey, there are lots of discounts, and the airfare to New York is way, way cheaper than it is to Argentina.

Plus, you can see “South Pacific.”

Sanford, as the whole world now knows, went missing in action when he secretly snuck off to Buenos Aires to see his lover. Ever since he got caught at the airport coming home, he has been confessing and apologizing and talking and talking and talking.

Some of his allies back in South Carolina have made a commendable, if self-interested, attempt to draw a line between Sanford’s private sins and his public role as chief executive.

But the governor himself, in an interview with The Associated Press, seemed more interested in what he called “the sex line,” which apparently exists to divide his “soul mate,” María Belén Chapur, from other women whom he’s lusted after in his heart — and possibly with his hands.

The whole “sex line” business called up memories of my Catholic girlhood, where the nuns could delineate the exact moment at which making out with your boyfriend advanced from venial to mortal sin territory. If Sanford has been reading from the same guidebook, it’s possible that he was listing every female he had ever bumped into in the hallway.

But we digress. In South Carolina, the debate started with the question of whether the real issue was the governor’s romantic life or his failure to leave anybody in charge when he vanished without so much as call-forwarding.

But Sanford was so clearly in the wrong on that count that his supporters quickly turned to matters of finance and whether he had traveled to Argentina on his own dime. He said he had — although he backtracked on a promise to prove it. And he agreed to reimburse the state for an earlier economic development trip to South America that he re-routed to Buenos Aires in the name of love.

Talking about money was familiar ground for South Carolina conservatives, and for a while it looked as if they might settle on a rule that sex is irrelevant unless it leads to a tax increase.

Then Sanford, who has been in an extremely peculiar mode ever since his return, gave that interview in which he described his trips to New York with Chapur. He said the most recent one occurred earlier this year and was approved by his wife, Jenny (Not the Soul Mate) Sanford under the theory that her husband only wanted to see his lover in order to break up with her.

Serving as chaperone was a “spiritual adviser,” who I hope was given enough downtime to enjoy a nice dinner and take in some sights. Chinatown is fun.

The revelations about that New York trip throw a new and interesting light on Sanford’s jaunt to Buenos Aires, for which he apparently also sought his wife’s blessing. I think I speak for us all when I say that no spouse is allowed more than one officially sanctioned goodbye visit to his mistress. Especially since there was apparently no spiritual counselor invited on the Argentina leg, an oversight that I’m sure was because of the expense.

Yet another reason why it is better to schedule all these get-togethers in the Big Apple. (Broadway tickets sold at a discount near Times Square!)

Having affairs in New York is a longtime American political tradition. The late, great R.W. Apple Jr. once told me that when he was a metro reporter for The Times in 1963, he was assigned to stake out the lobby of a hotel in Manhattan where President John F. Kennedy was spending the night. While on the lookout for official visitors, Apple said he saw “a young woman of a Hollywood nature” heading for the presidential suite. He quickly called his editor, who informed him “I was there to report the comings and goings of statesmen, not starlets.”

If that happened now, of course, the only question would be whether Apple could avoid being run over by a crew from TMZ.

Meanwhile, back in South Carolina, Sanford’s continued yammering started to weird out his fellow Republicans. State Senator John Courson, who had been in the vanguard of the just-show-me-the-money cadre, called Sanford’s crossing-the-line remark “troubling.”

“I would need further explanation of that from him,” the senator said. Although one would think the last thing Sanford’s career needs is further explanation.

The state party chair delicately suggested that the governor might want to free up his schedule so he could “devote his efforts full time to repairing the damage in his personal life.” Perhaps with a reconciliation weekend. We could offer some excellent deals on the honeymoon suite at the Plaza.

Here’s Mr. Kristof:

Our political system sometimes produces such skewed results that it’s difficult not to blame bloviating politicians. But maybe the deeper problem lies in our brains.

Evidence is accumulating that the human brain systematically misjudges certain kinds of risks. In effect, evolution has programmed us to be alert for snakes and enemies with clubs, but we aren’t well prepared to respond to dangers that require forethought.

If you come across a garter snake, nearly all of your brain will light up with activity as you process the “threat.” Yet if somebody tells you that carbon emissions will eventually destroy Earth as we know it, only the small part of the brain that focuses on the future — a portion of the prefrontal cortex — will glimmer.

“We humans do strange things, perhaps because vestiges of our ancient brain still guide us in the modern world,” notes Paul Slovic, a psychology professor at the University of Oregon and author of a book on how our minds assess risks.

Consider America’s political response to these two recent challenges:

1. President Obama proposes moving some inmates from Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to supermax prisons from which no one has ever escaped. This is the “enemy with club” threat that we have evolved to be alert to, so Democrats and Republicans alike erupt in outrage and kill the plan.

2. The climate warms, ice sheets melt and seas rise. The House scrounges a narrow majority to pass a feeble cap-and-trade system, but Senate passage is uncertain. The issue is complex, full of trade-offs and more cerebral than visceral — and so it doesn’t activate our warning systems.

“What’s important is the threats that were dominant in our evolutionary history,” notes Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard University. In contrast, he says, the kinds of dangers that are most serious today — such as climate change — sneak in under the brain’s radar.

Professor Gilbert argues that the threats that get our attention tend to have four features. First, they are personalized and intentional. The human brain is highly evolved for social behavior (“that’s why we see faces in clouds, not clouds in faces,” says Mr. Gilbert), and, like gazelles, we are instinctively and obsessively on the lookout for predators and enemies.

Second, we respond to threats that we deem disgusting or immoral — characteristics more associated with sex, betrayal or spoiled food than with atmospheric chemistry.

“That’s why people are incensed about flag burning, or about what kind of sex people have in private, even though that doesn’t really affect the rest of us,” Professor Gilbert said. “Yet where we have a real threat to our well-being, like global warming, it doesn’t ring alarm bells.”

Third, threats get our attention when they are imminent, while our brain circuitry is often cavalier about the future. That’s why we are so bad at saving for retirement. Economists tear their hair out at a puzzlingly irrational behavior called hyperbolic discounting: people’s preference for money now rather than much larger payments later.

For example, in studies, most Americans prefer $50 now to $100 in six months, even though that represents a 100 percent return.

Fourth, we’re far more sensitive to changes that are instantaneous than those that are gradual. We yawn at a slow melting of the glaciers, while if they shrank overnight we might take to the streets.

In short, we’re brilliantly programmed to act on the risks that confronted us in the Pleistocene Age. We’re less adept with 21st-century challenges.

At the University of Virginia, Professor Jonathan Haidt shows his Psychology 101 students how evolution has prepared us to fear some things: He asks how many students would be afraid to stand within 10 feet of a friend carrying a pet boa constrictor. Many hands go up, although almost none of the students have been bitten by a snake.

“The objects of our phobias, and the things that are actually dangerous to us, are almost unrelated in the modern world, but they were related in our ancient environment,” Mr. Haidt said. “We have no ‘preparedness’ to fear a gradual rise in the Earth’s temperature.”

This short-circuitry in our brains explains many of our policy priorities. We Americans spend nearly $700 billion a year on the military and less than $3 billion on the F.D.A., even though food-poisoning kills more Americans than foreign armies and terrorists. We’re just lucky we don’t have a cabinet-level Department of Snake Extermination.

Still, all is not lost, particularly if we understand and acknowledge our neurological shortcomings — and try to compensate with rational analysis. When we work at it, we are indeed capable of foresight: If we can floss today to prevent tooth decay in later years, then perhaps we can also drive less to save the planet.

Dowd and Friedman

MoDo, in “Rules of the Wronged,” has produced The Practical Guide to Help Spurned Political Wives Survive Old Problems in the Era of New Technology.  The Moustache of Wisdom says “Just Do It,” and that for all its flaws, the House energy bill is America’s first comprehensive attempt to mitigate climate change. Now the Senate needs to pass it.  Here’s MoDo:

Stay focused, ladies. Here is The Practical Guide to Help Spurned Political Wives Survive Old Problems in the Era of New Technology.

1. Skip the press conference, especially when your husband is copping to call girls, gay pickups in airport bathrooms or “tragic” and “forbidden” telenovela-style love stories. Stoicism at the skunk’s side is overrated and, as Larry Craig’s wife learned, sunglasses don’t help.

2. When there’s an Associated Press bulletin quoting your husband saying that he has found his soul mate but he’s going to try to fall back in love with you, change the locks. (At your second home, too.)

3. If you can’t maintain a dignified Silda Spitzer silence; if you can’t find a girlfriend, a shrink, a personal trainer, a hairdresser or a yoga teacher to confide in; if you must unburden yourself of your fury about your loser husband, go to Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton or even Deepak Chopra before crying to The A.P. A news wire is not a spiritual adviser.

4. When your husband turns into a Harlequin romance, babbling to The A.P. — yes, even The A.P. thought it was T.M.I. — about a magical encounter on an open-air dance floor in Uruguay, “a soul that touches yours in a way that no one’s ever has,” and the “left brain and right brain” compartmentalization of “the world of ideas that impact this country and state” and “the pursuit of happiness, whatever that is,” just beat it.

5. If you think the worst is over, it’s probably only beginning. On Tuesday, after you thought Mark Sanford had already emoted and burbled more than any man in history, he volunteered to The A.P. (again!) that he had “crossed lines” with a handful of women on trips out of the country, but only “crossed the ultimate line” with his enchanting Maria. And just when you thought John Edwards could not sink any lower, there is news of a sex tape, in which Rielle Hunter shows off her skills not only in videography but pornography.

6. No matter how revolting your husband’s behavior is, don’t be passive-aggressive in public. Refrain from making any remarks that have a veneer of dignity but derogatory subtexts that sound like: “We’re trying to reconcile but it’s going to be tough because he has irreparably damaged my children” or “He has no integrity and I want my kids to have integrity” and “Sure, I’d like to give him a chance if he weren’t such a sleazeball.”

7. Don’t bring the children into it. They suffer enough being the kids of politicians. In the era of Facebook, texting, Google and iPhones, calling him out as a bad father will just go viral in the kids’ circles. Don’t trot out the family on “Oprah,” as Elizabeth Edwards did, or weepily show The A.P. the report cards of your two oldest sons from their elite private school in Columbia, S.C., as Jenny Sanford did.

8. Even if you’re a clever, competent woman, you risk sounding like a stereotypical harridan if you use the kids as a bludgeon and tell the press, as Jenny did: “You would think that a father who didn’t have contact with his children, if he wanted those children, he would toe the line a little bit.” When kids are involved, it’s best to chill when dishing out revenge.

9. Don’t slam his girlfriend for lying when you know she’s telling the truth. Don’t refer to the baby your rival had with your husband as “it.” Don’t trash a mistress, as Hillary and Elizabeth did, as a wacky stalker. No one — except the wife — blames the girlfriend as much as they blame the husband. Besides, you invite The Other Woman’s retaliation, as when Rielle decided — after watching Elizabeth spill to Oprah — that she might want that DNA test after all.

10. High-powered women like Hillary, Elizabeth and Jenny who give up their careers to focus on their husbands’ ambitions feel doubly betrayed. But it’s not your husband’s fault if you sacrifice more for the relationship than he does. Like an investor in a down market, you took a risk without a guarantee it would pay off. If you make your husband your career and you lose your husband, you lose your career, too.

11. Cut your losses and keep going. Don’t let yourself get dragged into his drama or your reputation may follow his down the well. Hillary refused to let that happen. She salvaged her long investment in Bill Clinton and turned a profit when she became a senator.

12. As you stay out of the spotlight that singes your husband, listen to whatever messages he is sending you through the press. When your husband says that is a world-class love story, ask him what this is. Just don’t do it through The A.P.

Now here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

There is much in the House cap-and-trade energy bill that just passed that I absolutely hate. It is too weak in key areas and way too complicated in others. A simple, straightforward carbon tax would have made much more sense than this Rube Goldberg contraption. It is pathetic that we couldn’t do better. It is appalling that so much had to be given away to polluters. It stinks. It’s a mess. I detest it.

Now let’s get it passed in the Senate and make it law.

Why? Because, for all its flaws, this bill is the first comprehensive attempt by America to mitigate climate change by putting a price on carbon emissions. Rejecting this bill would have been read in the world as America voting against the reality and urgency of climate change and would have undermined clean energy initiatives everywhere.

More important, my gut tells me that if the U.S. government puts a price on carbon, even a weak one, it will usher in a new mind-set among consumers, investors, farmers, innovators and entrepreneurs that in time will make a big difference — much like the first warnings that cigarettes could cause cancer. The morning after that warning no one ever looked at smoking the same again.

Ditto if this bill passes. Henceforth, every investment decision made in America — about how homes are built, products manufactured or electricity generated — will look for the least-cost low-carbon option. And weaving carbon emissions into every business decision will drive innovation and deployment of clean technologies to a whole new level and make energy efficiency much more affordable. That ain’t beanbag.

Now that the bill is heading for the Senate, though, we must, ideally, try to improve it, but, at a minimum, guard against diluting it any further. To do that we need the help of the three parties most responsible for how weak the bill already is: the Republican Party, President Barack Obama and We the People.

This bill is not weak because its framers, Representatives Henry Waxman and Ed Markey, wanted it this way. “They had to make the compromises they did,” said Dan Becker, director of the Safe Climate Campaign, “because almost every House Republican voted against the bill and did nothing to try to improve it. So to get it passed, they needed every coal-state Democrat, and that meant they had to water it down to bring them on board.”

What are Republicans thinking? It is not as if they put forward a different strategy, like a carbon tax. Does the G.O.P. want to be the party of sex scandals and polluters or does it want to be a partner in helping America dominate the next great global industry: E.T. — energy technology? How could Republicans become so anti-environment, just when the country is going green?

Historically speaking, “Republicans can claim as much credit for America’s environmental leadership as Democrats,” noted Glenn Prickett, senior vice president at Conservation International. “The two greatest environmental presidents in American history were Teddy Roosevelt, who created our national park system, and Richard Nixon, whose administration gave us the Clean Air Act and the Environmental Protection Agency.” George Bush Sr. signed the 1993 Rio Treaty, to preserve biodiversity.

Yes, this bill’s goal of reducing U.S. carbon emissions to 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 is nowhere near what science tells us we need to mitigate climate change. But it also contains significant provisions to prevent new buildings from becoming energy hogs, to make our appliances the most energy efficient in the world and to help preserve forests in places like the Amazon.

We need Republicans who believe in fiscal conservatism and conservation joining this legislation in the Senate. We want a bill that transforms the whole country not one that just threads a political needle. I hope they start listening to green Republicans like Dick Lugar, George Shultz and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

I also hope we will hear more from President Obama. Something feels very calculating in how he has approached this bill, as if he doesn’t quite want to get his hands dirty, as if he is ready to twist arms in private, but not so much that if the bill goes down he will get tarnished. That is no way to fight this war. He is going to have to mobilize the whole country to pressure the Senate — by educating Americans, with speech after speech, about the opportunities and necessities of a serious climate/energy bill. If he is not ready to risk failure by going all out, failure will be the most likely result.

And then there is We the People. Attention all young Americans: your climate future is being decided right now in the cloakrooms of the Capitol, where the coal lobby holds huge sway. You want to make a difference? Then get out of Facebook and into somebody’s face. Get a million people on the Washington Mall calling for a price on carbon. That will get the Senate’s attention. Play hardball or don’t play at all.

Bobo and Herbert

Bobo got out his crayons and produced “Vince Lombardi Politics” in which he opines that leading Democrats seem open to nearly any idea so long as it will lead to passing legislation, perhaps at the expense of passing sensible legislation.  Mr. Herbert asks “How Long is Long Enough?” and tells us that Mohammed Jawad was captured as a teenager in Kabul and tortured in American custody. Now administration lawyers are blocking efforts to secure his freedom.  Here’s Bobo:

Freud said we’re forever changed by the traumas of our youth, and so it is with the Democrats and Clintoncare. Even as you watch the leading Democrats today in their moment of glory, you can still see wounds caused by the defeat of the Clinton health care initiative. You see the psychic reactions and the scars and the lessons they have taken away so that sort of debacle never happens again.

The first lesson they have learned is that domestic policy making should never be dictated from the White House. The Clinton health initiative was hatched in the executive branch and unleashed on Congress. So the Obama administration is doing the opposite, handing Congress working control of every major piece of legislation.

Congress wrote the stimulus package. Congress wrote the cap-and-trade bill. Congress is writing the health care bill. The House and Senate chairmen make more decisions on these issues than anybody on the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

Second, Democrats learned never to go to war against the combined forces of corporate America. Today, whether it is on the stimulus, on health care or any other issue, the Obama administration and the Congressional leadership go out of their way to court corporate interests, to win corporate support and to at least divide corporate opposition.

Third, the Clintoncare collapse and the ensuing decade in the wilderness drove home the costs of failure. This has produced a Vince Lombardi attitude toward winning. There are limits, of course, but leaders in Congress and in the administration seem open to nearly any idea so long as it will lead to passing legislation. On health care, the administration would like a strong public plan, but it is evidently open to a weak one. It is on record against taxing health benefits, but it is clearly willing to tax them. It will do what it takes to pass a bill.

All of this has produced a ruthlessly pragmatic victory machine. Last week Democrats were able to pass a politically treacherous cap-and-trade bill out of the House. The Democratic leaders were able to let 44 members vote no and still bribe/bully/cajole enough of their colleagues to get a win. This was an impressive achievement, and a harbinger for health care and other battles to come.

But the new approach comes with its own shortcomings. To understand them, we have to distinguish between two types of pragmatism. There is legislative pragmatism — writing bills that can pass. Then there is policy pragmatism — creating programs that work. These two pragmatisms are in tension, and in their current frame of mind, Democrats often put the former before the latter.

On the stimulus bill, the Democratic committee chairmen wrote a sprawling bill that incorporated the diverse wishes of hundreds of members and interest groups. But as they did so, the bill had less and less to do with stimulus. Only about 40 percent of the money in the bill was truly stimulative, and that money was not designed to be spent quickly. For example, according to the Congressional Budget Office, only 11 percent of the discretionary spending in the stimulus will be disbursed by the end of the fiscal year. The bill passed, but it is not doing much to create jobs this year and it will not do nearly as much as it could to create jobs in 2010.

On cap and trade, the House chairmen took a relatively clean though politically difficult idea — auctioning off pollution permits — and they transformed it into a morass of corporate giveaways that make the stimulus bill look parsimonious. Permits would now be given to well-connected companies. Utilities and agribusiness would be rolling in government-generated profits. Thousands of goodies were thrown into the 1,201-page bill to win votes.

The bill passed the House, but would it actually reduce emissions? It’s impossible to know. It contains so many complex market interventions that only a fantasist could confidently predict its effects. A few years ago the European Union passed a cap-and-trade system, but because it was so shot through with special interest caveats, emissions actually rose.

On health care, too, the complicated job of getting a bill that can pass is taking priority over the complicated task of creating a program that can work. Dozens of different ideas are being added, watered down or merged together in order to cobble together a majority. But will the logrolling produce a sustainable health system that controls costs and actually hangs together?

The great paradox of the age is that Barack Obama, the most riveting of recent presidents, is leading us into an era of Congressional dominance. And Congressional governance is a haven for special interest pleading and venal logrolling.

When the executive branch is dominant you often get coherent proposals that may not pass. When Congress is dominant, as now, you get politically viable mishmashes that don’t necessarily make sense.

Here’s Mr. Herbert:

No one seems to know how old Mohammed Jawad was when he was seized by Afghan forces in Kabul six and a half years ago and turned over to American custody. Some reports say he was 14. Some say 16. The Afghan government believes he was 12.

What is not in dispute is that he was no older than an adolescent, and that since his capture he has been tortured and otherwise put through hell. The evidence against him has been discredited. He has tried to commit suicide. But the U.S. won’t let him go.

The treatment of the young captive was so egregious that the decorated U.S. Army officer assigned to prosecute him — a man gung-ho to secure a conviction against a defendant he believed had committed a serious crime against the American military — ended up removing himself from the case and declaring that he could no longer “in good conscience” participate in the military commissions set up to try accused terrorists.

Jawad was accused of hurling a hand grenade into a vehicle occupied by two American soldiers and their Afghan interpreter in December 2002. All three occupants of the vehicle were seriously injured.

Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld of the U.S. Army Reserve, a recipient of the Bronze Star, among other commendations, was named the lead prosecutor on the case in 2007. By then, Jawad had already been held for nearly five years. Colonel Vandeveld assumed that the case would be uncomplicated and that a conviction could be easily secured.

Jawad had confessed to the attack and, according to the charges against him, had acted as a member of an insurgent group called Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin.

As Colonel Vandeveld began a diligent effort to assemble what he assumed would be the evidence that would convict Jawad, he became increasingly distressed and ultimately dismayed. It turned out, as a military judge would later rule, that Jawad’s Afghan captors had obtained his confession by torturing him. Then the boy was taken by U.S. authorities to Bagram Air Field, the main U.S. military installation in Afghanistan, where he was held before eventually being transferred to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Colonel Vandeveld — “by sheer happenstance,” as he put it — came across a written summary of an interview of Jawad by a special agent of the Army Criminal Investigation Division. The summary, which was part of the official record of an entirely different case at Bagram, detailed extensive abuse that Jawad said had been inflicted on him at Bagram.

In a sworn affidavit, Colonel Vandeveld said, “This abuse included the slapping of Mr. Jawad across the face while Mr. Jawad’s head was covered with a hood, as well as Mr. Jawad’s having been shoved down a stairwell while both hooded and shackled.”

Jawad’s account had the ring of truth. As Colonel Vandeveld said in the affidavit, the interviewer “later testified as a defense witness … that Mr. Jawad’s statement was completely consistent with the statements of other prisoners held at Bagram at the time and, more importantly, that dozens of the guards had admitted to abusing the prisoners in exactly the way described by Jawad.”

Jawad also complained about being mistreated at Guantánamo, saying he had been moved with absurd frequency from cell to cell — the idea being to deprive him of sleep. A check of the official prison logs showed that Jawad had in fact been moved 112 times, without explanation, from one cell to another in a two-week period — an average of eight moves a day for 14 days.

As Colonel Vandeveld said in his affidavit: “Upon further investigation, we were able to determine that Mr. Jawad had been subjected to a sleep deprivation program popularly referred to as the ‘frequent flyer’ program.” The colonel said he lacked the words “to express the heartsickness” he felt as he came to fully understand the way Jawad had been treated by American soldiers.

On Dec. 25, 2003, Jawad tried to kill himself by repeatedly banging his head against a wall of his cell.

There is no credible evidence against Jawad, and his torture-induced confession has rightly been ruled inadmissible by a military judge. But the Obama administration does not feel that he has suffered enough. Not only have administration lawyers opposed defense efforts to secure Jawad’s freedom, but they are using, as the primary basis for their opposition, the fruits of the confession that was obtained through torture and has already been deemed inadmissible — without merit, of no value.

Colonel Vandeveld is no longer on active duty and has joined the effort by military defense lawyers and the American Civil Liberties Union to secure Jawad’s freedom. Six years of virtual solitary confinement, he said, is enough for someone who was not much older than a child when he was taken into custody.

Douthat and Krugman

Pasty little Ross Douthat has a question about “The Way We Love Now:”  Have modern American couples let anxieties about children, mortgages and success destroy their passion and romance?  This pudgy little slug has serious issues with women and should most certainly STFU about romance.  Katha Pollett in The Nation skewers him better than I could.  Mr. Krugman says we are “Betraying the Planet,” and that climate change poses a clear and present danger to our way of life. How can anyone justify failing to act?  Here’s that creepy little slug Asshat:

It’s been a good month for reckless romance in America. The nation’s most famous reality-television father, Jon Gosselin of “Jon and Kate Plus Eight,” threw over his marriage for a fling with a 23-year-old schoolteacher. Not one but two prominent conservative politicians torpedoed their careers with public confessions of adultery — with Mark Sanford’s Argentine disappearing act eclipsing John Ensign’s accusation of extortion against his lover’s spouse.

These irrepressible passions make a fascinating counterpoint to the complaint, advanced this month by two of the nation’s finest essayists, that modern relationships have been drained of danger and purged of eros.

In her new polemic “A Vindication of Love,” an assault on the idea of safety in romance, Cristina Nehring complains that contemporary couplings have so restrained true passion that “the poor beast has become as impotent as it is domestic.” In a post-divorce essay for The Atlantic, Sandra Tsing Loh autopsies not only her own marriage but those of her peers, a cohort of middle-aged Los Angelenos who’ve let the quest for security turn them into sexless drudges.

Both writers depict a country where pragmatic anxieties — think of the children! think of the mortgage! — are forever trumping romance and dulling the libido. Theirs is a nation of nesters who have clipped their own wings.

So which is the real America? Is it Tsing Loh’s dystopia, where everyone “works” grimly on their relationships, and post-feminist husbands happily cook saffron-infused porcini risotto but rarely practice seduction on their wives? Or is it tabloid country: The land of Jon minus Kate, and governors who vanish to “hike the Appalachian Trail” — not to mention gossip-column fixtures like Britney Spears (rumored last week to be contemplating her third marriage in six years) and the mistress-parading Mel Gibson?

One possible answer is that our stars and politicians are a species apart — more impulsive and incautious than the average Dick and Jane, and more libidinous as well.

But the evidence suggests the opposite. The high-wire love lives of a Jon Gosselin or a Mark Sanford — or a Spears, or even a Lindsey Lohan — are remarkably true to the America that watches their shows, buys their CDs, and votes them into office. It’s the highly-educated, highly risk-averse milieu lamented by Nehring and Tsing Loh that’s a world unto itself.

Their complaints about this world’s romance deficit are substantially overstated, obviously — and shot through with a dash of self-justification. (Tsing Loh had an affair; Nehring recently became an unwed mother.) But both do put their finger on a post-sexual revolution paradox — namely, that the same overclass that was once most invested in erotic experimentation ended up building the sturdiest walls against the passions it unleashed.

As Nehring observes, our hyper-educated, socially-liberal elite is considerably more romantically conservative than its blasé attitude toward pornography or premarital sex would lead you to expect. The difficult scramble up the meritocratic ladder tends to discourage wild passions and death-defying flings. For bright young overachievers, there’s often a definite tameness to the way that collegiate “safe sex” segues into the upwardly-mobile security of “companionate marriages” — or, if you’re feeling more cynical, “consumption partnerships.”

This tameness has beneficial social consequences: When it comes to divorce rates and out-of-wedlock births, Americans with graduate degrees are still living in the 1950s. It’s the rest of the country that marries impulsively, divorces frequently, and bears a rising percentage of its children outside marriage. Indeed, if you’re looking for modern-day Percy Shelleys or Mary Wollstonecrafts (to pluck a pair of Nehring’s romantic risk-takers), you’re more likely to find them in Middle America than among the environmental lawyers and documentary filmmakers who populate Tsing Loh’s depressing social world.

Better, perhaps, if this dynamic were reversed. Our meritocrats could stand to leaven their careerism with a little more romantic excess. (Though such excess is more appropriate in the young, it should be emphasized, than in middle-aged essayists and parents.) But most Americans, particularly those of modest means, would benefit from greater caution and stability in their romantic entanglements.

Maybe this reversal could start with some creative matchmaking across lines of class and politics. The dutiful, somewhat-boring husbands from Sandra Tsing Loh’s Los Angeles, for instance, sound like ideal soulmates for Kate Gosselin, the soon-to-be-single mother of eight.

And as for Cristina Nehring, who can’t live without being “derailed by love, hospitalized by love, flung around five continents, shaken, overjoyed, inspired and unsettled by love” — well, maybe someone should introduce her to Mark Sanford.

Ick.  Here’s Mr. Krugman:

So the House passed the Waxman-Markey climate-change bill. In political terms, it was a remarkable achievement.

But 212 representatives voted no. A handful of these no votes came from representatives who considered the bill too weak, but most rejected the bill because they rejected the whole notion that we have to do something about greenhouse gases.

And as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason — treason against the planet.

To fully appreciate the irresponsibility and immorality of climate-change denial, you need to know about the grim turn taken by the latest climate research.

The fact is that the planet is changing faster than even pessimists expected: ice caps are shrinking, arid zones spreading, at a terrifying rate. And according to a number of recent studies, catastrophe — a rise in temperature so large as to be almost unthinkable — can no longer be considered a mere possibility. It is, instead, the most likely outcome if we continue along our present course.

Thus researchers at M.I.T., who were previously predicting a temperature rise of a little more than 4 degrees by the end of this century, are now predicting a rise of more than 9 degrees. Why? Global greenhouse gas emissions are rising faster than expected; some mitigating factors, like absorption of carbon dioxide by the oceans, are turning out to be weaker than hoped; and there’s growing evidence that climate change is self-reinforcing — that, for example, rising temperatures will cause some arctic tundra to defrost, releasing even more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Temperature increases on the scale predicted by the M.I.T. researchers and others would create huge disruptions in our lives and our economy. As a recent authoritative U.S. government report points out, by the end of this century New Hampshire may well have the climate of North Carolina today, Illinois may have the climate of East Texas, and across the country extreme, deadly heat waves — the kind that traditionally occur only once in a generation — may become annual or biannual events.

In other words, we’re facing a clear and present danger to our way of life, perhaps even to civilization itself. How can anyone justify failing to act?

Well, sometimes even the most authoritative analyses get things wrong. And if dissenting opinion-makers and politicians based their dissent on hard work and hard thinking — if they had carefully studied the issue, consulted with experts and concluded that the overwhelming scientific consensus was misguided — they could at least claim to be acting responsibly.

But if you watched the debate on Friday, you didn’t see people who’ve thought hard about a crucial issue, and are trying to do the right thing. What you saw, instead, were people who show no sign of being interested in the truth. They don’t like the political and policy implications of climate change, so they’ve decided not to believe in it — and they’ll grab any argument, no matter how disreputable, that feeds their denial.

Indeed, if there was a defining moment in Friday’s debate, it was the declaration by Representative Paul Broun of Georgia that climate change is nothing but a “hoax” that has been “perpetrated out of the scientific community.” I’d call this a crazy conspiracy theory, but doing so would actually be unfair to crazy conspiracy theorists. After all, to believe that global warming is a hoax you have to believe in a vast cabal consisting of thousands of scientists — a cabal so powerful that it has managed to create false records on everything from global temperatures to Arctic sea ice.

Yet Mr. Broun’s declaration was met with applause.

Given this contempt for hard science, I’m almost reluctant to mention the deniers’ dishonesty on matters economic. But in addition to rejecting climate science, the opponents of the climate bill made a point of misrepresenting the results of studies of the bill’s economic impact, which all suggest that the cost will be relatively low.

Still, is it fair to call climate denial a form of treason? Isn’t it politics as usual?

Yes, it is — and that’s why it’s unforgivable.

Do you remember the days when Bush administration officials claimed that terrorism posed an “existential threat” to America, a threat in whose face normal rules no longer applied? That was hyperbole — but the existential threat from climate change is all too real.

Yet the deniers are choosing, willfully, to ignore that threat, placing future generations of Americans in grave danger, simply because it’s in their political interest to pretend that there’s nothing to worry about. If that’s not betrayal, I don’t know what is.

MoDo, Friedman, Kristof and Rich

MoDo talks about “Genius in the Bottle,” and says with his Argentine lover, Mark Sanford was no longer the penny-pinching governor, but someone more fascinating: Marco, international man of mystery.  The Moustache of Wisdom says we must “Invent, Invent, Invent,” and that the country that endows its people with more tools and basic research to create new goods and services is the one that will not just survive this crisis but thrive down the road.  Mr. Kristof says “It’s Time to Learn From Frogs,” and that scientists are beginning to find a connection between bizarre deformities in water animals and abnormalities in humans.  Mr. Rich gives us “40 Years Later, Still Second-Class Americans,” and says gay civil rights history is moving faster in the country than it is in Washington.  Here’s MoDo:

As in all great affairs, Mark Sanford fell in love simultaneously with a woman and himself — with the dashing new version of himself he saw in her molten eyes.

In a weepy, gothic unraveling, the South Carolina governor gave a press conference illustrating how smitten he was, not only with his Argentine amante, but with his own tenderness, his own pathos and his own feminine side.

He got into trouble as a man and tried to get out as a woman.

He wanted to get his girlfriend a DVD of the movie “The Holiday,” presumably the Cameron Diaz-Kate Winslet chick flick about two women, one from L.A. and one from England, who trade homes and lives. He was fantasizing about catapulting himself into an exotic life where stimulus had nothing to do with budgets.

With Maria, he was no longer the penny-pinching millionaire Mark, who used to sleep on a futon in his Congressional office and once treated two congressmen to movie refreshments by bringing back a Coke and three straws.

No, he was someone altogether more fascinating: Marco, international man of mystery and suave god of sex and tango.

Mark was the self-righteous, Bible-thumping prig who pressed for Bill Clinton’s impeachment; Marco was the un-self-conscious Lothario, canoodling with Maria in Buenos Aires, throwing caution to the e-wind about their “soul-mate feel,” her tan lines, her curves, “the erotic beauty of you holding yourself (or two magnificent parts of yourself) in the faded glow of night’s light.”

Mark is a conservative railing against sinners; Marco sins liberally. Mark opposes gay marriage as a threat to traditional marriage. Marco thinks nothing of risking his own traditional marriage, and celebrates transgressive relationships. He frets to Maria in e-mail that he sounds “like the Thornbirds — wherein I was always upset with Richard Chamberlain for not dropping his ambitions and running into Maggie’s arms.”

Marco, the libertine, wonders how they will ever “put the Genie back in the bottle.” And in the sort of Freudian slip that any solipsistic pol like Mark would adore, Maria protests in Spanglish: “I don’t want to put the genius back in the bottle.”

Mark is so frugal for the taxpayers that he made his staffers use both sides of Post-it notes and index cards, and once brought two (defecating) pigs named “Pork” and “Barrel” into the statehouse to express his disgust with lawmakers’ pet spending projects.

Marco is a sly scamp who found a sneaky way to make South Carolina taxpayers pay for a south-of-the-border romp with his mistress.

Mark is so selfish he tried to enhance his presidential chances by resisting South Carolina’s share of President Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package, callously giving the back of his hand to the suffering state’s most vulnerable — the jobless and poor and black students.

Marco is generous, promising to send a memento of affection that Maria wants to keep by her bed.

Mark hates lying. As he said of Bill’s dalliance with Monica, “If you undermine trust in our system, you undermine everything.”

Marco lies with brio, misleading his family, his lieutenant governor, his staff and his state about his whereabouts, even packing camping equipment to throw off the scent from South America. He told whoppers to his wife, a former investment banker who managed his campaigns and raises his four sons (solo on Father’s Day). She put out a statement quoting Psalm 127 to snidely remind her besotted husband “that sons are a gift from the Lord.”

Jenny Sanford told The Associated Press on Friday that Mark had told her he needed time to be alone and write, so she was stunned to learn he was in Argentina on a “Roman Holiday.” Before he left to “write,” she warned him not to skip off to the other woman.

Mark, who disdains rascals, agreed that he wouldn’t. Marco, who is a rascal, skipped off.

Mark went back to work on Friday, giving his cabinet a lecture on personal responsibility and comparing himself to King David, who “fell mightily … in very, very significant ways but then picked up the pieces and built from there.”

Actually, the one thing David didn’t do after his adulterous fall was build, because he was forbidden by God to construct his dream temple in Jerusalem.

Sanford should give his piety a rest. He told his cabinet that the Psalms taught him humility. (There’s a chance that a younger Argentine boyfriend of Maria’s also taught him humility, by jealously hacking into her e-mail account and leaking the governor’s missives.)

Sanford can be truly humble only if he stops dictating to others, who also have desires and weaknesses, how to behave in their private lives.

The Republican Party will never revive itself until its sanctimonious pantheon — Sanford, Gingrich, Limbaugh, Palin, Ensign, Vitter and hypocrites yet to be exposed — stop being two-faced.

Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

I was at a conference in St. Petersburg, Russia, a few weeks ago and interviewed Craig Barrett, the former chairman of Intel, about how America should get out of its current economic crisis. His first proposal was this: Any American kid who wants to get a driver’s license has to finish high school. No diploma — no license. Hey, why would we want to put a kid who can barely add, read or write behind the wheel of a car?

Now what does that have to do with pulling us out of the Great Recession? A lot. Historically, recessions have been a time when new companies, like Microsoft, get born, and good companies separate themselves from their competition. It makes sense. When times are tight, people look for new, less expensive ways to do old things. Necessity breeds invention.

Therefore, the country that uses this crisis to make its population smarter and more innovative — and endows its people with more tools and basic research to invent new goods and services — is the one that will not just survive but thrive down the road.

We might be able to stimulate our way back to stability, but we can only invent our way back to prosperity. We need everyone at every level to get smarter.

I still believe that America, with its unrivaled freedoms, venture capital industry, research universities and openness to new immigrants has the best assets to be taking advantage of this moment — to out-innovate our competition. But we should be pressing these advantages to the max right now.

Russia, it seems to me, is clearly wasting this crisis. Oil prices rebounded from $30 to $70 a barrel too quickly, so the pressure for Russia to really reform and diversify its economy is off. The struggle for Russia’s post-Communist economic soul — whether it is going to be more OPEC than O.E.C.D., a country that derives more of its wealth from drilling its mines than from tapping its minds — seems to be over for now.

At the St. Petersburg exposition center, showing off the Russian economy, the two biggest display booths belonged to Gazprom, the state-controlled oil and gas company, and Sberbank, Russia’s largest state-owned bank. Russian companies that actually made things that the world wanted were virtually nonexistent: Two-thirds of Russia’s exports today are oil and gas. Gazprom makes the money, and Sberbank lends it out.

As one Western banker put it, when oil is $35 a barrel, Russia “has no choice” but to reform, to diversify its economy and to put in place the rule of law and incentives that would really stimulate small business. But at $70 a barrel, it takes an act of enormous “political will,” which the petro-old K.G.B. alliance that dominates the Kremlin today is unlikely to summon. Too much rule of law and transparency would constrict the ruling clique’s own freedom of maneuver.

China is also courting trouble. Recently — in the name of censoring pornography — China blocked access to Google and demanded that computers sold in China come supplied with an Internet nanny filter called Green Dam Youth Escort, starting July 1. Green Dam can also be used to block politics, not just Playboy. Once you start censoring the Web, you restrict the ability to imagine and innovate. You are telling young Chinese that if they really want to explore, they need to go abroad.

We should be taking advantage. Now is when we should be stapling a green card to the diploma of any foreign student who earns an advanced degree at any U.S. university, and we should be ending all H-1B visa restrictions on knowledge workers who want to come here. They would invent many more jobs than they would supplant. The world’s best brains are on sale. Let’s buy more!

Barrett argues that we should also use this crisis to: 1) require every state to benchmark their education standards against the best in the world, not the state next door; 2) double the budgets for basic scientific research at the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy and the National Institute of Standards and Technology; 3) lower the corporate tax rate; 4) revamp Sarbanes-Oxley so that it is easier to start a small business; 5) find a cost-effective way to extend health care to every American.

We need to do all we can now to get more brains connected to more capital to spawn more new companies faster. As Jeff Immelt, the chief of General Electric, put it in a speech on Friday, this moment is “an opportunity to turn financial adversity into national advantage, to launch innovations of lasting value to our country.”

Sometimes, I worry, though, that what oil money is to Russia, our ability to print money is to America. Look at the billions we just printed to bail out two dinosaurs: General Motors and Chrysler.

Lately, there has been way too much talk about minting dollars and too little about minting our next Thomas Edison, Bob Noyce, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Vint Cerf, Jerry Yang, Marc Andreessen, Sergey Brin, Bill Joy and Larry Page. Adding to that list is the only stimulus that matters. Otherwise, we’re just Russia with a printing press.

Now here’s Mr. Kristof:

Some of the first eerie signs of a potential health catastrophe came as bizarre deformities in water animals, often in their sexual organs.

Frogs, salamanders and other amphibians began to sprout extra legs. In heavily polluted Lake Apopka, one of the largest lakes in Florida, male alligators developed stunted genitals.

In the Potomac watershed near Washington, male smallmouth bass have rapidly transformed into “intersex fish” that display female characteristics. This was discovered only in 2003, but the latest survey found that more than 80 percent of the male smallmouth bass in the Potomac are producing eggs.

Now scientists are connecting the dots with evidence of increasing abnormalities among humans, particularly large increases in numbers of genital deformities among newborn boys. For example, up to 7 percent of boys are now born with undescended testicles, although this often self-corrects over time. And up to 1 percent of boys in the United States are now born with hypospadias, in which the urethra exits the penis improperly, such as at the base rather than the tip.

Apprehension is growing among many scientists that the cause of all this may be a class of chemicals called endocrine disruptors. They are very widely used in agriculture, industry and consumer products. Some also enter the water supply when estrogens in human urine — compounded when a woman is on the pill — pass through sewage systems and then through water treatment plants.

These endocrine disruptors have complex effects on the human body, particularly during fetal development of males.

“A lot of these compounds act as weak estrogen, so that’s why developing males — whether smallmouth bass or humans — tend to be more sensitive,” said Robert Lawrence, a professor of environmental health sciences at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “It’s scary, very scary.”

The scientific case is still far from proven, as chemical companies emphasize, and the uncertainties for humans are vast. But there is accumulating evidence that male sperm count is dropping and that genital abnormalities in newborn boys are increasing. Some studies show correlations between these abnormalities and mothers who have greater exposure to these chemicals during pregnancy, through everything from hair spray to the water they drink.

Endocrine disruptors also affect females. It is now well established that DES, a synthetic estrogen given to many pregnant women from the 1930s to the 1970s to prevent miscarriages, caused abnormalities in the children. They seemed fine at birth, but girls born to those women have been more likely to develop misshaped sexual organs and cancer.

There is also some evidence from both humans and monkeys that endometriosis, a gynecological disorder, is linked to exposure to endocrine disruptors. Researchers also suspect that the disruptors can cause early puberty in girls.

A rush of new research has also tied endocrine disruptors to obesity, insulin resistance and diabetes, in both animals and humans. For example, mice exposed in utero even to low doses of endocrine disruptors appear normal at first but develop excess abdominal body fat as adults.

Among some scientists, there is real apprehension at the new findings — nothing is more terrifying than reading The Journal of Pediatric Urology — but there hasn’t been much public notice or government action.

This month, the Endocrine Society, an organization of scientists specializing in this field, issued a landmark 50-page statement. It should be a wake-up call.

“We present the evidence that endocrine disruptors have effects on male and female reproduction, breast development and cancer, prostate cancer, neuroendocrinology, thyroid, metabolism and obesity, and cardiovascular endocrinology,” the society declared.

“The rise in the incidence in obesity,” it added, “matches the rise in the use and distribution of industrial chemicals that may be playing a role in generation of obesity.”

The Environmental Protection Agency is moving toward screening endocrine disrupting chemicals, but at a glacial pace. For now, these chemicals continue to be widely used in agricultural pesticides and industrial compounds. Everybody is exposed.

“We should be concerned,” said Dr. Ted Schettler of the Science and Environmental Health Network. “This can influence brain development, sperm counts or susceptibility to cancer, even where the animal at birth seems perfectly normal.”

The most notorious example of water pollution occurred in 1969, when the Cuyahoga River in Ohio caught fire and helped shock America into adopting the Clean Water Act. Since then, complacency has taken hold.

Those deformed frogs and intersex fish — not to mention the growing number of deformities in newborn boys — should jolt us once again.

Last but no least, here’s Mr. Rich:

Like all students caught up in the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s, I was riveted by the violent confrontations between the police and protestors in Selma, 1965, and Chicago, 1968. But I never heard about the several days of riots that rocked Greenwich Village after the police raided a gay bar called the Stonewall Inn in the wee hours of June 28, 1969 — 40 years ago today.

Then again, I didn’t know a single person, student or teacher, male or female, in my entire Ivy League university who was openly identified as gay. And though my friends and I were obsessed with every iteration of the era’s political tumult, we somehow missed the Stonewall story. Not hard to do, really. The Times — which would not even permit the use of the word gay until 1987 — covered the riots in tiny, bowdlerized articles, one of them but three paragraphs long, buried successively on pages 33, 22 and 19.

But if we had read them, would we have cared? It was typical of my generation, like others before and after, that the issue of gay civil rights wasn’t on our radar screen. Not least because gay people, fearful of harassment, violence and arrest, were often forced into the shadows. As David Carter writes in his book “Stonewall,” at the end of the 1960s homosexual sex was still illegal in every state but Illinois. It was a crime punishable by castration in seven states. No laws — federal, state or local — protected gay people from being denied jobs or housing. If a homosexual character appeared in a movie, his life ended with either murder or suicide.

The younger gay men — and scattered women — who acted up at the Stonewall on those early summer nights in 1969 had little in common with their contemporaries in the front-page political movements of the time. They often lived on the streets, having been thrown out of their blue-collar homes by their families before they finished high school. They migrated to the Village because they’d heard it was one American neighborhood where it was safe to be who they were.

Stonewall “wasn’t a 1960s student riot,” wrote one of them, Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, in a poignant handwritten flier on display at the New York Public Library in the exhibition “1969: The Year of Gay Liberation.” They had “no nice dorms for sleeping,” “no school cafeteria for certain food” and “no affluent parents” to send checks. They had no powerful allies of any kind, no rights, no future. But they were brave. They risked their necks to prove, as Lanigan-Schmidt put it, that “the mystery of history” could happen “in the least likely of places.”

After the gay liberation movement was born at Stonewall, this strand of history advanced haltingly until the 1980s. It took AIDS and the new wave of gay activism it engendered to fully awaken many, including me, to the gay people all around them. But that tardy and still embryonic national awareness did not save the lives of those whose abridged rights made them even more vulnerable during a rampaging plague.

On Monday, President Obama will commemorate Stonewall with an East Room reception for gay leaders. Some of the invitees have been fiercely critical of what they see as his failure, thus far, to redeem his promise to be a “fierce advocate” for their still unfulfilled cause. The rancor increased this month, after the Department of Justice filed a brief defending the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), the most ignominious civil rights betrayal under the last Democratic president, Bill Clinton.

The Obama White House has said that the Justice Department action was merely a bureaucratic speed bump on the way to repealing DOMA — which hardly mitigates the brief’s denigration of same-sex marriage, now legal in six states after many hard-fought battles. The White House has also asserted that its Stonewall ceremony was “long planned” — even though it sure looks like damage control. News of the event trickled out publicly only last Monday, after dozens of aggrieved, heavy-hitting gay donors dropped out of a Democratic National Committee fund-raiser with a top ticket of $30,400.

In conversations with gay activists on both coasts last week, I heard several theories as to why Obama has seemed alternately clumsy and foot-dragging in honoring his campaign commitments to dismantle DOMA and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. The most charitable take had it that he was following a deliberate strategy, given his habit of pursuing his goals through long-term game plans. After all, he’s only five months into his term and must first juggle two wars, the cratered economy, health care and Iran. Some speculated that the president is fearful of crossing preachers, especially black preachers, who are adamantly opposed to same-sex marriage. Still others said that the president was tone-deaf on the issue because his inner White House circle lacks any known gay people.

But the most prevalent theory is that Obama, surrounded by Clinton White House alumni with painful memories, doesn’t want to risk gay issues upending his presidency, as they did his predecessor’s in 1993. After having promised to lift the ban on gays in the military, Clinton beat a hasty retreat into Don’t Ask once Congress and the Pentagon rebelled. This early pratfall became a lasting symbol of his chaotic management style — and a precursor to another fiasco, Hillarycare, that Obama is also working hard not to emulate.

But 2009 is not then, and if the current administration really is worried that it could repeat Clinton’s history on Don’t Ask, that’s ludicrous. Clinton failed less because of the policy’s substance than his fumbling of the politics. Even in 1992 a majority of the country (57 percent) supported an end to the military ban on gays. But Clinton blundered into the issue with no strategy at all and little or no advance consultation with the Joint Chiefs and Congress. That’s never been Obama’s way.

The cultural climate is far different today, besides. Now, roughly 75 percent of Americans support an end to Don’t Ask, and gay issues are no longer a third rail in American politics. Gay civil rights history is moving faster in the country, including on the once-theoretical front of same-sex marriage, than it is in Washington. If the country needs any Defense of Marriage Act at this point, it would be to defend heterosexual marriage from the right-wing “family values” trinity of Sanford, Ensign and Vitter.

But full gay citizenship is far from complete. “There’s a perception in Washington that you can throw little bits of partial equality to gay people and that gay people will be satisfied with that,” said Dustin Lance Black, the screenwriter who won an Oscar for “Milk,” last year’s movie about Harvey Milk, the pioneering gay civil rights politician of the 1970s. Such “crumbs,” Black added, cannot substitute for “full and equal rights in all matters of civil law in all 50 states.”

As anger at White House missteps boiled over this month, the president abruptly staged a ceremony to offer some crumbs. The pretext was the signing of an executive memorandum bestowing benefits to the domestic partners of federal employees. But some of those benefits were already in force, and the most important of them all, health care, was not included because it is forbidden by DOMA.

One gay leader invited to the Oval Office that day was Jennifer Chrisler of the Family Equality Council, an advocacy organization for gay families based in Massachusetts. She showed a photo of her 7-year-old twin sons, Tom and Tim, to Obama. The president cooed. “I told him they’re following in Sasha’s footsteps, entering the second grade,” she recounted to me last week. “It was a very human exchange between two parents.”

Chrisler seized the moment to appeal to the president on behalf of her boys. “The worst thing you can experience as parents is to feel your children are discriminated against,” she told him. “Imagine if you have to explain every day who your parents are and that they’re as real as every family is.” Chrisler said that she and her children “want a president who will make that go away,” adding, “I believe in his heart he wants that to happen, his political mistakes notwithstanding.”

No president possesses that magic wand, but Obama’s inaction on gay civil rights is striking. So is his utterly uncharacteristic inarticulateness. The Justice Department brief defending DOMA has spoken louder for this president than any of his own words on the subject. Chrisler noted that he has given major speeches on race, on abortion and to the Muslim world. “People are waiting for that passionate speech from him on equal rights,” she said, “and the time is now.”

Action would be even better. It’s a press cliché that “gay supporters” are disappointed with Obama, but we should all be. Gay Americans aren’t just another political special interest group. They are Americans who are actively discriminated against by federal laws. If the president is to properly honor the memory of Stonewall, he should get up to speed on what happened there 40 years ago, when courageous kids who had nothing, not even a public acknowledgment of their existence, stood up to make history happen in the least likely of places.

Collins, Blow, Herbert and Cohen

Ms. Collins looks at “The S. C. Firecracker” and says the public can look past a politician’s plain-vanilla affair. The problem comes when so much is piled on to what started out as a little treat that it begins to look unnerving.  Mr. Blow, in “The Prurient Trap,” says conservatives used sexual morality as a weapon and now it’s shooting them in the foot.  Mr. Herbert sees “No Recovery in Sight,” and says economists say that the recession may end sometime this year, but the unemployment rate will continue to climb. That’s not a recovery. That’s mumbo jumbo.  From Tehran Mr. Cohen tells of “Iran’s Second Sex,” and says Iran’s women stand in the vanguard against the state and the men who have accepted their discrimination.  Here’s Ms. Collins:

The only good news this week for Gov. Mark (“I love your tan lines”) Sanford is that all those celebrity deaths have knocked him off the top of the news cycle.

For the rest of us, the whole vanishing-governor-sneaks-off-to-visit-Argentine-squeeze has had a number of side benefits. The Appalachian Trail has certainly gotten a well-deserved shot of publicity. And I have to believe that business is booming for call-forwarding services.

Another big plus is that Governor Sanford has provided us with a chance to revisit little-remembered historical precedents for scandals involving American politicians and Argentine women.

O.K., I can only think of one. It was, of course, the evening in 1974 when Fanne Foxe, “The Argentine Firecracker,” took a hysterical leap into the Tidal Basin after a fight with her inebriated escort, the House Ways and Means Chairman Wilbur Mills of Arkansas.

Foxe was a stripper at the Silver Slipper nightclub in Washington, and the married Mills began escorting her around during a period of major-league alcoholism. They were speeding past the Jefferson Memorial when they were stopped by police. Foxe jumped out, took a dive into the Tidal Basin, and pretty soon Mills was in the headlines and in disgrace.

Years later, after he had retired, dried out and returned to Washington as a tax lawyer, Mills told a Times reporter that during his Firecracker days, he was drinking a half-gallon of vodka a night and had hallucinations that buzzards were chasing him. As a result, he said, he lost control of his committee and failed to report out a bill in which he had a great interest.

“I had President Ford convinced on national health,” Mills said. “I could have passed it on the floor. But hell, I couldn’t get the damned committee to go with me. They had never failed to do that before, and I know now it was because of my drinking that they didn’t.”

Whether or not Mills was overestimating his pre-buzzard ability to move legislation, this story brings up two important points, only one of which is that we were already failing to pass national health care in 1974.

The other is that sex was the least of his problems.

The public will almost always look past a politician’s plain-vanilla affair. The problem comes when he piles on icing and sprinkles and coconut and then kumquats and zucchini and sardines until what started out as a little treat begins to look really unnerving.

New Jersey would have been ready to accept the news that its married governor, James McGreevey, was in love with a male Israeli poet. But not a male Israeli poet whom he had convinced to hang around with a job as head of state homeland security. New York could definitely have handled the fact that Gov. Eliot Spitzer cheated on his wife if it had not been for all that detail about Client 9 at Emperor’s Club V.I.P. escort service. And even Mills’s fellow House members, many of whom were undoubtedly sexual sinners themselves, decided it was probably not a good idea to have the nation’s tax policy being written by a guy who thinks there’s a buzzard on his desk.

Now South Carolinians will have to decide if they want their state run by a man who can’t remember to leave a forwarding number when he scampers off to make whoopee in a different hemisphere.

While most people in the state seem to feel as if it would be swell if Sanford just resigned, the governor isn’t showing any signs that he intends to quit. It isn’t entirely clear why he wants to hang on. He’s term limited. And whatever presidential ambitions he harbored were pretty much quashed when he vanished and aides started explaining that he took a hike (well, not really) because he was emotionally exhausted from his fight over the state budget. You had to ask what he’d have to do to get over North Korea.

So far, it appears that Sanford is going to devote his career to apologizing. On Wednesday, he held a press conference and apologized to everyone from his father-in-law to American Christianity. On Thursday, he was closeted with his wife, which undoubtedly involved heavy-duty apology time. Friday, he called his staff together for more apologies, including one to the leader of the Commerce Department, to whom the governor conveyed his regrets for having undermined the dignity of a state trade mission by having sex on the Buenos Aires stop.

It was right about then that Sanford compared himself to King David, who “fell mightily, he fell in very significant ways, but was able to pick up the pieces.” I will end here so we can all ask ourselves whether the entire course of the Old Testament would have been different if David and Bathsheba had had access to e-mail.

Here’s Mr. Blow:

“Hiking the Appalachian Trail.” Is that what we’re calling it these days? That’s what Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina told his staff that he was going to do when he absconded to Argentina to be with his “sweetest” Maria of the “magnificently gentle kisses.”

I had no particular interest in rubbernecking this disaster. People make mistakes. The flesh is weak, the heart disobedient and marriages hard. According to the General Social Survey, about 10 percent of married people admit that they have cheated on their spouses. And, according to a USA Today/Gallup poll taken in March last year, 54 percent of Americans say that they know someone who has been unfaithful. ’Twas ever thus.

At the end of the day, aside from the dereliction of duty and malfeasance, this, for me, would be a private matter. That is if it were not for the appalling hypocrisy of yet another social conservative saying one thing while doing another.

There are Democratic sex scandals to be sure, but Democrats didn’t build a franchise on holier-than-thou moral rectitude. The Republicans did. They used sexual morality as a weapon and now it’s shooting them in the foot.

Sanford voted to impeach Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky saga. According to The Post and Courier of Charleston, Sanford called Clinton’s behavior “reprehensible” and said, “I think it would be much better for the country and for him personally” to resign. “I come from the business side. … If you had a chairman or president in the business world facing these allegations, he’d be gone.” Remember that Mr. Sanford?

And this kind of hypocrisy isn’t confined to the politicians. It permeates the electorate. While conservatives fight to “defend” marriage from gays, they can’t keep theirs together. According to the Census Bureau’s Statistical Abstract, states that went Republican in November accounted for eight of the 10 states with the highest divorce rates in 2006.

Conservatives touted abstinence-only education, which was a flop, when real sex education was needed, most desperately in red states. According to 2006 data from the Guttmacher Institute, those red states accounted for eight of the 10 states with the highest teenage birthrates.

And, a study titled “Red Light States: Who Buys Online Adult Entertainment?” that was conducted by Benjamin Edelman, an assistant professor of business at Harvard Business School and published earlier this year in the Journal of Economic Perspectives found that subscriptions to online pornography sites were “more prevalent in states where surveys indicate conservative positions on religion, gender roles, and sexuality” and in states where “more people agree that ‘I have old-fashioned values about family and marriage.’ ”

They could avoid this hypocrisy by focusing more on what happens in their own bedrooms and avoiding the trap of judging what goes on in everyone else’s.

Now here’s Mr. Herbert:

How do you put together a consumer economy that works when the consumers are out of work?

One of the great stories you’ll be hearing over the next couple of years will be about the large number of Americans who were forced out of work in this recession and remained unable to find gainful employment after the recession ended. We’re basically in denial about this.

There are now more than five unemployed workers for every job opening in the United States. The ranks of the poor are growing, welfare rolls are rising and young American men on a broad front are falling into an abyss of joblessness.

Some months ago, the Obama administration and various mainstream economists forecast a peak unemployment rate of roughly 8 percent this year. It has already reached 9.4 percent, and most analysts now expect it to hit 10 percent or higher. Economists are currently spreading the word that the recession may end sometime this year, but the unemployment rate will continue to climb. That’s not a recovery. That’s mumbo jumbo.

Why this rampant joblessness is not viewed as a crisis and approached with the sense of urgency and commitment that a crisis warrants, is beyond me. The Obama administration has committed a great deal of money to keep the economy from collapsing entirely, but that is not enough to cope with the scope of the jobless crisis.

There were roughly seven million people officially counted as unemployed in November 2007, a month before the recession began. Now there are about 14 million. If you add to these unemployed individuals those who are working part time but would like to work full time, and those who want jobs but have become discouraged and stopped looking, you get an underutilization rate that is truly alarming.

“By May 2009,” according to the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston, “the total number of underutilized workers had increased dramatically from 15.63 million to 29.37 million — a rise of 13.7 million, or 88 percent. Nearly 30 million working-age individuals were underutilized in May 2009, the largest number in our nation’s history. The overall labor underutilization rate in May 2009 had risen to 18.2 percent, its highest value in 26 years.”

If it were true that the recession is approaching its end and that these startlingly high numbers were about to begin a steady and substantial decline, there would be much less reason for alarm. But while there is evidence the recession is easing, hardly anyone believes a big-time employment turnaround is in the offing.

Three-quarters of the workers let go over the past year were permanently displaced, as opposed to temporarily laid off. They won’t be going back to their jobs when economic conditions improve. And many of those who were permanently displaced were in fields like construction and manufacturing in which the odds of finding work, even after a recovery takes hold, are not good.

Another startling aspect of this economic downturn is the toll it has taken on men, especially young men. Men accounted for nearly 80 percent of the loss in employment in this recession. As the labor market center reported, “The unemployment rate for males in April 2009 was 10 percent, versus only 7.2 percent for women, the largest absolute and relative gender gap in unemployment rates in the post-World War II period.”

Workers under 30 have sustained nearly half the net job losses since November 2007.

This is not a recipe for a strong economic recovery once the recession officially ends, or for a healthy society. Young males, especially, are being clobbered at an age when, typically, they would be thinking about getting married, setting up new households and starting families. Moreover, work habits and experience developed in one’s 20s often establish the foundation for decades of employment and earnings.

We’ve seen what happens when you rely on debt and inflated assets to keep the economy afloat. The economy can’t be re-established on a sound basis without aggressive efforts to put people back to work in jobs with decent wages.

We also need to consider the suffering that is being endured by these high levels of joblessness, including the profound negative effect on the families of the unemployed. Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, warned about the consequences for children. “What does it mean,” he asked, “when kids are under stress because there is no money in the household, or people have to move more, or are combining households, or lose their health insurance? I believe this is going to leave a permanent scar on a generation of kids.”

The first step in dealing with a crisis is to recognize that it exists. This is not a problem that will evaporate when the gross domestic product finally begins to creep into positive territory.

And last but not least here’s Mr. Cohen:

From Day 1, Iran’s women stood in the vanguard. Their voices from rooftops were loudest, and their defiance in the streets boldest. “Stand, don’t run,” Nazanine told me as the baton-wielding police charged up handsome Vali Asr avenue on the day after the fraudulent election. She stood.

Images assail me: a slender woman clutching her stomach outside Tehran University after the blow; a tall woman gesticulating to the men behind her to advance on the shiny-shirted Basij militia; women shedding tears of distilled indignation; and that young woman who screamed, “We are all so angry. Will they kill us all?”

How can a revolution kill its children? The post-1979 generation has risen, not alone, but in the lead. Perhaps Iran cannot be an exception to the rule that revolutions devour themselves.

A friend told me he no longer recognizes his wife. She’d been of the reluctantly acquiescent school. Now, “She’s a revolutionary.” I followed as she led us up onto the roof. The “death to the dictator” that surged from her into the night was of rare ferocity.

Women marched in 1979, too. But when the revolution was won, women were pushed out. Their subjugation became a pillar of the Islamic state. One woman told me that she had been 20 when she fought to oust the shah. “It’s simple,” she said. “We wanted freedom then, and we don’t have it now.”

In a way it is simple: laws that can force a girl into marriage at 13; discriminatory laws on inheritance; the segregated beaches on the Caspian; the humiliation of arrest for a neck revealed or an ankle-length skirt (a gust of wind might show a forbidden flash of leg); the suffocation that leads one artist I know to raise her hands to her neck.

Yes, it’s simple. From the outset, the regime targeted women, calculating that the patriarchal culture of the country would embrace the idea of an Islamic diktat that “put women in their place.”

But then again nothing in Iran is simple. One benefit of the massive show of resistance to a stolen vote, and future, has been to awaken Americans to the civic vitality of Iranian society — a real country with real people rather than a bunch of zealous clerics posing a nuclear problem.

This is a sea change. Iran has been denuclearized, not in the sense that the problem has gone away (on the contrary), but in the sense that a rounded picture, beyond to bomb or not to bomb, has formed.

Say Iran and murdered Neda Agha-Sultan surges where a bearded mullah once stood. Young, modern, connected, Neda just wanted to live her life. She personifies a certain Iran I’ve tried to evoke since the beginning of this year.

In some senses, women of her 20-something generation have benefited from the revolution; I told you to forget simplicity. It took an ayatollah to tell traditional families to educate their daughters. Today 60 percent of university students are women, about double the figure in 1982.

Here we stand close to the tragedy of this election. The vote offered an opportunity to bridge the gap between a fast-changing society of highly educated women and the regime. Past elections have served that purpose, nudging the clerical establishment in reformist directions.

Instead, hard-liners around President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad opted for schism, a historic error. The Iran of yesterday is gone, the Iran of tomorrow not yet born.

I don’t want to suggest that Iran is a nation of women thirsting to cast off their chadors. As Saeed Leylaz told me before he was thrown in jail along with most of Iran’s reformist brain trust, “Our feet are in traditionalism and our heads in modernism.” Zahra Rahnavard, the strong-willed wife of Mir Hussein Moussavi, the opposition leader, troubled as she inspired.

When a friend asked one Ahmadinejad supporter his reasons, the reply was brusque: because “all the whores are with Moussavi.” Cultural battle lines of great clarity have been drawn since June 12.

Women are angry with the state, of course. But they are also angry with the passive way men have accepted discrimination. Be strong! Fight harder! These are immediate messages summoned from old frustrations.

Their courage and pain haunt me. We need Delacroix to paint them. We need President Obama to put engagement — still the right medium-term objective — on hold in their name.

Islam has a lot to say about the rights of women; the mullahs of Qom have lots of training in how to say the opposite of what they said before. The revolution might have bent toward the women it fashioned. But it has stiffened against what it birthed, never wise.

I asked one woman about her fears. She said sometimes she imagines an earthquake in Tehran. She dashes out but forgets her hijab. She stands in the ruins, hair loose and paralyzed, awaiting her punishment. And she looked at me wide-eyed as if to say: do you understand, does the world understand our desperation?

Bobo and Krugman

Bobo has his sciencey hat on today.  He scrawled a thing called “Human Nature Today,” in which he loftily opines that evolutionary psychology has had a good run. But now there is growing pushback. Critics say the theory is being used to try to explain more than it can bear.  Mr. Krugman, in “Not Enough Audacity,” says President Obama has eloquently explained the case for health care reform, but wonders whether he will compromise so much to get a plan through Congress that it won’t do the job.  My bet is yes, he will.  Here’s Bobo:

Has there ever been a time when there were so many different views of human nature floating around all at once? The economists have their view, in which rational people coolly chase incentives. Traditional Christians have their view, emphasizing original sin, grace and the pilgrim’s progress in a fallen world. And then there are the evolutionary psychologists, who get the most media attention.

For 99 percent of human history, they observe, our species lived in small hunter-gatherer bands. The people who survived developed certain mental modules, which have been passed down to us through our genes. Some of these traits serve us well in the modern age. Children have the capacity to learn language with astonishing speed. Some of these traits don’t. Humans have an insatiable craving for fatty and sugary foods.

In 2000, Geoffrey Miller, a leading evolutionary psychologist, published a book called “The Mating Mind,” in which he argued that the process of sexual selection among early human groups hardwired many of the behaviors we see in humans today. Some of the traits are physical. Men generally prefer women with a 0.7 waist-to-hip ratio (that’s a 24-inch waist and 36-inch hips, for those of you reading this at the gym). Women generally prefer men who are taller and slightly older.

Some of these traits are more subtle. Men, Miller argues, tip better in restaurants, because they’ve been programmed to show how much surplus wealth they have. The average American adult knows 60,000 words, far more than we need. We have all those words because we like to mate with people who caress us with language.

Now Miller has published another book, “Spent,” in which he takes evolutionary psychology to the mall. The basic argument is that each of us is born with our own individual level of six big traits: intelligence, openness to new things, conscientiousness, agreeableness, emotional stability and extraversion. These modules are built into humans and other animals (apparently squid can be shy).

We are all narcissists, Miller asserts. We spend much of our lives trying to broadcast our excellence in these traits in order to attract mates. Even if we’re not naturally smart or outgoing, we buy products and brands that give the impression we are.

According to Miller, driving an Acura, Infiniti, Subaru or Volkswagen is a sign of high intelligence. Driving a Cadillac, Chrysler, Ford or Hummer is a sign of low intelligence. Listening to Bjork is a sign of high intelligence, while listening to Lynyrd Skynyrd is a sign of low intelligence. Watching Quentin Tarantino movies is a sign of high openness. He theorizes that teenage girls may cut themselves as a way to demonstrate their ability to withstand infections.

Evolutionary psychology has had a good run. But now there is growing pushback. Sharon Begley has a rollicking, if slightly overdrawn, takedown in the current Newsweek. And “Spent” is a sign that the theory is being used to try to explain more than it can bear.

The first problem is that far from being preprogrammed with a series of hardwired mental modules, as the E.P. types assert, our brains are fluid and plastic. We’re learning that evolution can be a more rapid process than we thought. It doesn’t take hundreds of thousands of years to produce genetic alterations.

Moreover, we’ve evolved to adapt to diverse environments. Different circumstances can selectively activate different genetic potentials. Individual behavior can vary wildly from one context to another. An arrogant bully on the playground may be meek in math class. People have kaleidoscopic thinking styles and use different cognitive strategies to solve the same sorts of problems.

Evolutionary psychology leaves the impression that human nature was carved a hundred thousand years ago, and then history sort of stopped. But human nature adapts to the continual flow of information—adjusting to the ancient information contained in genes and the current information contained in today’s news in a continuous, idiosyncratic blend.

The second problem is one evolutionary psychology shares with economics. It’s too individualistic: individuals are born with certain traits, which they seek to maximize in the struggle for survival.

But individuals aren’t formed before they enter society. Individuals are created by social interaction. Our identities are formed by the particular rhythms of maternal attunement, by the shared webs of ideas, symbols and actions that vibrate through us second by second. Shopping isn’t merely a way to broadcast permanent, inborn traits. For some people, it’s also an activity of trying things on in the never-ending process of creating and discovering who they are.

The allure of evolutionary psychology is that it organizes all behavior into one eternal theory, impervious to the serendipity of time and place. But there’s no escaping context. That’s worth remembering next time somebody tells you we are hardwired to do this or that.

Here’s Prof. Krugman:

When it comes to domestic policy, there are two Barack Obamas.

On one side there’s Barack the Policy Wonk, whose command of the issues — and ability to explain those issues in plain English — is a joy to behold.

But on the other side there’s Barack the Post-Partisan, who searches for common ground where none exists, and whose negotiations with himself lead to policies that are far too weak.

Both Baracks were on display in the president’s press conference earlier this week. First, Mr. Obama offered a crystal-clear explanation of the case for health care reform, and especially of the case for a public option competing with private insurers. “If private insurers say that the marketplace provides the best quality health care, if they tell us that they’re offering a good deal,” he asked, “then why is it that the government, which they say can’t run anything, suddenly is going to drive them out of business? That’s not logical.”

But when asked whether the public option was non-negotiable he waffled, declaring that there are no “lines in the sand.” That evening, Rahm Emanuel met with Democratic senators and told them — well, it’s not clear what he said. Initial reports had him declaring willingness to abandon the public option, but Senator Kent Conrad’s staff later denied that. Still, the impression everyone got was of a White House all too eager to make concessions.

The big question here is whether health care is about to go the way of the stimulus bill.

At the beginning of this year, you may remember, Mr. Obama made an eloquent case for a strong economic stimulus — then delivered a proposal falling well short of what independent analysts (and, I suspect, his own economists) considered necessary. The goal, presumably, was to attract bipartisan support. But in the event, Mr. Obama was able to pick up only three Senate Republicans by making a plan that was already too weak even weaker.

At the time, some of us warned about what might happen: if unemployment surpassed the administration’s optimistic projections, Republicans wouldn’t accept the need for more stimulus. Instead, they’d declare the whole economic policy a failure. And that’s exactly how it’s playing out. With the unemployment rate now almost certain to pass 10 percent, there’s an overwhelming economic case for more stimulus. But as a political matter it’s going to be harder, not easier, to get that extra stimulus now than it would have been to get the plan right in the first place.

The point is that if you’re making big policy changes, the final form of the policy has to be good enough to do the job. You might think that half a loaf is always better than none — but it isn’t if the failure of half-measures ends up discrediting your whole policy approach.

Which brings us back to health care. It would be a crushing blow to progressive hopes if Mr. Obama doesn’t succeed in getting some form of universal care through Congress. But even so, reform isn’t worth having if you can only get it on terms so compromised that it’s doomed to fail.

What will determine the success or failure of reform? Above all, the success of reform depends on successful cost control. We really, really don’t want to get into a position a few years from now where premiums are rising rapidly, many Americans are priced out of the insurance market despite government subsidies, and the cost of health care subsidies is a growing strain on the budget.

And that’s why the public plan is an important part of reform: it would help keep costs down through a combination of low overhead and bargaining power. That’s not an abstract hypothesis, it’s a conclusion based on solid experience. Currently, Medicare has much lower administrative costs than private insurance companies, while federal health care programs other than Medicare (which isn’t allowed to bargain over drug prices) pay much less for prescription drugs than non-federal buyers. There’s every reason to believe that a public option could achieve similar savings.

Indeed, the prospects for such savings are precisely what have the opponents of a public plan so terrified. Mr. Obama was right: if they really believed their own rhetoric about government waste and inefficiency, they wouldn’t be so worried that the public option would put private insurers out of business. Behind the boilerplate about big government, rationing and all that lies the real concern: fear that the public plan would succeed.

So Mr. Obama and Democrats in Congress have to hang tough — no more gratuitous giveaways in the attempt to sound reasonable. And reform advocates have to keep up the pressure to stay on track. Yes, the perfect is the enemy of the good; but so is the not-good-enough-to-work. Health reform has to be done right.

Collins and Kristof

Ms. Collins, in “The Love Party,” says Mark Sanford is the latest G.O.P. hopeful to do a swan dive off the adultery cliff. Perhaps the Republican Party has been too strict about the no-girlfriends-while-running-for-president rule.  (Ms. Collins seems to forget the cardinal rule — IOKIYAR.)  Mr. Kristof, in “The Prescription From Obama’s Own Doctor,” says President Obama should tune out the A.M.A.’s position on the public insurance option as part of health reform and reach out instead to somebody he’s often trusted for medical advice.  Here’s Ms. Collins:

On behalf of the people of Illinois and New York, I’d like to thank South Carolina for giving us Mark (“I’ve been unfaithful to my wife”) Sanford. Finally, a governor who’s weirder than Rod Blagojevich and less responsible than Eliot Spitzer.

Really, we’re extremely relieved.

Sanford, as we all now know, went AWOL from his state last week, then re-emerged to admit that he had not been on the Appalachian Trail writing a book, as the chaotic explanations from his family and his staff had suggested, but in South America where he had gone to break up with his lover. “I spent the last five days crying in Argentina,” he said, completely ignoring all we have learned from Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Sanford was widely regarded as a Republican presidential contender. Many of you may have forgotten this, but for a while in 2008 he was a serious candidate to be John McCain’s running mate. (We now stop briefly to contemplate the possibility that there were even worse options than Sarah Palin.) Now, he’s become the second GOP hopeful in a week to do a swan dive off the adultery cliff. Perhaps the party has been too strict about the no-girlfriends-while-running-for-president rule. If they don’t drop it, pretty soon the youngest contender will be 75.

Until Wednesday’s unpleasantness, Sanford was chairman of the Republican Governors Association, otherwise known as the Association of Possible Presidential Contenders Plus Arnold. Over the past few years, he has tried to woo the party’s base with antics like bringing two piglets into the Capitol to protest political pork and refusing to accept $700 million in federal stimulus money aimed at preventing massive layoffs of public school teachers.

For a state with an unemployment rate above 12 percent, that ranks 39th in public school performance, that last caper might not seem all that entertaining. But it did draw the attention and affection of right-wing commentators, who nudged Sanford right up the potential-contender ladder.

However, all that is in the past. Although his wife issued a statement holding out the possibility of reconciliation, the press conference made it clear that sexual indiscretion is less the big problem here than the fact that Mark Sanford is a complete loony. “I won’t begin in any particular spot,” he said, rambling on about his “love for the Appalachian Trail” (where he didn’t go) and his fondness for “adventure trips” (clearly a personal specialty).

Then Sanford apologized to his wife, his sons, his friends, his staff, his in-laws, “anybody who lives in South Carolina” and people of faith “across the nation.” At this point, I had the terrible feeling that I was the only person in the entire country to whom Sanford was not conveying his personal regrets.

The peculiar thing about the apologies was that Sanford seemed to be under the impression that his worst dereliction of duty involved womanizing. I think I speak for us all when I say that if a governor wants to fly off for a rendezvous with his mistress, the first rule should be: leave a phone number. If you must flee to a love nest, make sure it’s one with an Internet connection.

“It was interesting how this thing has gone down,” Sanford told the assembled reporters, launching, with occasional teary asides, into an extremely boring story about how he and the unnamed Argentine had been good friends and then he tried to help her keep her marriage together, and then they started e-mailing and yadda yadda yadda. (When the governor said “I’ll tell you more detail than you’ll ever want” it was actually easy to believe him.) The whole confessional began to sound like an episode of one of those Finding Love reality shows, when the Bachelorette demands to know if her 25 suitors are all there for the right reasons.

There are some larger lessons here. I know you’re relieved to hear that, since it is highly unlikely that anybody actually gives a fig about Mark Sanford. (Including, perhaps, his beleaguered staff, which spent the last week fending off calls from the lieutenant governor and diligently filing Sanford’s daily Twitter.)

First of all, we may want to consider the possibility that the governor’s decision to reject the federal stimulus money was not a mighty stand against government spending but instead an early sign of total nuttiness.

Second, perhaps it is time to rethink the idea of constantly electing middle-aged heterosexual men to positions of high importance.

Third, although the governor-run-amok thing is worrisome, South Carolinians can take comfort in the fact their state gives its chief executive slightly less power than a game warden.

Fourth, before this search for a presidential nominee goes any further, I’m thinking it’s time for the Republicans to apologize for putting us through the Clinton impeachment. We seem to have pretty well established that sexual stone-throwing is a dangerous sport.

Here’s Mr. Kristof:

As a society, we trust doctors to be more concerned with the pulse of their patients than the pulse of commerce. Yet the American Medical Association is using that trust to try to block a robust public insurance option as part of health reform.

In fact the A.M.A. now represents only 19 percent of practicing physicians (that’s my calculation, which the A.M.A. neither confirms nor contests). Its membership has declined in part because of its embarrassing historical record: the A.M.A. supported segregation, opposed President Harry Truman’s plans for national health insurance, backed tobacco, denounced Medicare and opposed President Bill Clinton’s health reform plan.

So I hope President Obama tunes out the A.M.A. and reaches out instead to somebody to whom he’s turned often for medical advice. That’s Dr. David Scheiner, a Chicago internist who was Mr. Obama’s doctor for more than two decades, until he moved into the White House this year.

“They’ve always been on the wrong side of things,” Dr. Scheiner told me, speaking of the A.M.A. “They may be protecting their interests, but they’re not protecting the interests of the American public.

“In the past, physicians have risked their lives to take care of patients. The patient’s health was the bottom line, not the checkbook. Today, it’s just immoral what’s going on. It’s abominable, all these people without health care.”

Dr. Scheiner, 70, favors the public insurance option and would love to go further and see Medicare for all. He greatly admires Mr. Obama but worries that his health reforms won’t go far enough.

Dr. J. James Rohack, the president of the A.M.A., insisted to me that his group is committed to making health insurance accessible for all Americans, and that its paramount concern is patient health.

“When you don’t have health insurance, you live sicker and you die younger,” he said. “And that’s not something we’re proud of as Americans.”

He added that the A.M.A. is not necessarily opposed to a public option, and I have the impression that it might accept a pallid one built on co-ops. Dr. Rohack wouldn’t repudiate his association’s letter to the Senate Finance Committee warning against a new public plan. That letter declared: “The introduction of a new public plan threatens to restrict patient choice by driving out private insurers.”

I don’t mind the A.M.A. lobbying on behalf of doctors in the many areas where physicians and patients have common interests. The association is dead right, for example, in calling for curbs on lawsuits, which raise medical costs for everyone.

An excellent study published in 2006 in The New England Journal of Medicine found that for every dollar paid in compensation as a result of lawsuits against doctors, 54 cents goes to legal and administrative costs.

That’s an absurd waste of money. Moreover, aggressive law leads to defensive medicine, in the form of extra medical tests that waste everybody’s money. Tort reform should be a part of health reform.

Yet when the A.M.A. uses its lobbying muscle to oppose major health reform — yet again! — that feels like a betrayal. Doctors work hard to keep us healthy when we’re in their offices, and that’s why they win our trust and admiration — yet the A.M.A.’s lobbying has sometimes undermined the health of the very patients whom the doctors have sworn to uphold.

I might expect the American Association of Used Car Dealers to focus exclusively on wallet-fattening, but we expect better of physicians.

In fairness, most physicians expect better as well, which is why the A.M.A. is on the decline.

“It’s what has led to the decline of the A.M.A. over the last half century,” said Dr. David Himmelstein, a Massachusetts physician who also teaches at Harvard Medical School. “At this point only one in five practicing doctors are in the A.M.A., and even among its members about half disagree with its policies.” To back that last point, Dr. Himmelstein pointed to surveys showing a surprising number of A.M.A. members who support a single-payer system.

For his part, Dr. Himmelstein co-founded Physicians for a National Health Program, which now has more than 16,000 members. The far larger American College of Physicians, which is composed of internists and is the second-largest organization of doctors, is also open to a single-payer system and a public insurance option. It also quite rightly calls for emphasizing primary care.

The American Medical Student Association has issued a sharp statement disagreeing with the A.M.A.

The student association declared that it “not only supports but insists upon a public health insurance option.”

Look, a public option is no panacea, and it won’t automatically set right the many shortcomings in our health system. But if that option is killed in gestation, then we’re back to Square 1 and there’s little hope of progress in solving the vast challenges confronting us.

So, President Obama, don’t listen to the A.M.A. on this issue. Instead, for starters, call your doctor!

Dowd, Friedman and Cohen

MoDo has given us “Vice and Spice,” in which she says world leaders may have flaws, but Barack Obama’s nicotine addiction is positively monkish compared with Silvio Berlusconi’s Vesuvial vices.  The Moustache of Wisdom, in “The Green Revolution(s),” says Iranian reformers don’t need praise. They need the United States to end its dependency on the oil that finances Iran’s Islamic dictatorship.  Mr. Cohen says it is “The End of the Beginning,” and that the Iranian uprising of 2009 has ended its first phase, but the volatility is certain to endure over the coming year.  Here’s MoDo:

Sneaking a smoke now and again is not the worst presidential flaw imaginable.

Our president is positively monkish compared with Silvio Berlusconi, whose Vesuvial vices spurred a trio of women academics in Italy to write an “Appeal to the First Ladies.” It urges Michelle Obama and other wives of world leaders to boycott next month’s G-8 summit in L’Aquila, Italy, to protest the Italian prime minister’s “sexist” and “offensive” manner toward women.

One of the things the petitioners objected to, according to The Times of London, was Berlusconi’s attempt to put up actresses and showgirls as candidates in the European elections (not to mention as allegedly remunerated ornaments for wild parties at his posh villas).

His wife, Veronica Lario, a former actress who met him while she was starring topless in “The Magnificent Cuckold” and who is now divorcing him, has operatically upbraided him twice: once two years ago after he had a public flirtation with a TV starlet whom he later appointed as Minister of Equal Opportunities; and again last month when Lario charged her randy hubby with “consorting with minors” after he went to the 18th birthday party of a model and gave her a diamond and gold necklace.

Naturally, Berlusconi, who likes to be called “Papi” by his flock of chicks, upped the antics.

The paparazzi splashed photos of topless babes — or “L’harem di Berlusconi,” as they’re known — and a buck naked ex-Czech prime minister romping at Berlusconi’s villa in Sardinia.

And a comely 23-year-old starlet named Barbara Montereale told La Repubblica this week that she got paid by a hospital equipment vendor for going to the villa in January — an incident now under police investigation.

“We played with a little puppy that Bush had given him as a present,” she said.

She claimed she went with another girl, an “escort” named Patrizia D’Addario, who told her that she had had sex with the 72-year-old prime minister and asked for a favor about a building project but never got it. Now a disillusioned D’Addario has released a secret recording she made in which Berlusconi’s voice is heard saying: “Go and wait for me in the big bed.”

The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday night that Berlusconi, in an interview with the Italian society magazine Chi, which is owned by his holding company, denied that he had ever paid a woman to spend the night with him. “I’ve never understood what would be the satisfaction if there isn’t the pleasure of conquest,” he said, adding that he had “no memory” of D’Addario.

Given Berlusconi’s louche ways, L’Aquila is a safe place for President Obama to indulge his lingering smoking habit.

It’s interesting that someone with such daunting discipline can’t apply his willpower to cigarettes. The day after he signed a historic tobacco bill, the president conceded at a White House news conference that he “constantly” struggles with his vice and falls off the wagon sometimes.

He got testy with the McClatchy reporter who asked him about his bill and his habit, pointing out that the legislation was meant to stop “the next generation of kids” from smoking. Then he got even snippier with Major Garrett of Fox News, who referred to the president’s strong opening statement on Iran, noting: “You said about Iran that you were ‘appalled’ and ‘outraged.’ What took you so long to employ those words?”

The president protested that he had been consistent in trying not to let the White House and C.I.A. become foils that the Iranian government could blame.

When CBS News’s Chip Reed later asked Mr. Obama if he was “influenced at all by John McCain and Lindsey Graham accusing you of being timid and weak,” the president grinned dismissively.

But Mr. Obama regularly has to be cajoled by supporters and critics into using bolder rhetoric. It happened in his battle against Hillary during the campaign and with the A.I.G. bonuses and now Iran.

Privately, he gets irritated at those who make him out to be a wimp just because he tends not to react dramatically or visibly to events. That doesn’t mean he’s not responding or that he’s not tough, he says; it just means he’s not doing it on the timetable or at the decibel levels that some would prefer. Like the Bushes, he will point out, as he did at the press conference, he is the president and his critics are not.

He also got prickly with NBC News’s Chuck Todd when Todd said the president had “hinted” that there would be consequences for a repressive Iran.

“Well, I’m not hinting,” Mr. Obama said. “I think that when a young woman gets shot on the street when she gets out of her car, that’s a problem.”

When Todd asked why he wouldn’t spell out the consequences, the president shot back, “I know everybody here is on a 24-hour news cycle. I’m not. O.K.?”

It was enough to make a guy sneak out to the Truman balcony for a smoke.

Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

There has been a lot of worthless chatter about what President Barack Obama should say about Iran’s incipient “Green Revolution.” Sorry, but Iranian reformers don’t need our praise. They need the one thing we could do, without firing a shot, that would truly weaken the Iranian theocrats and force them to unshackle their people. What’s that? End our addiction to the oil that funds Iran’s Islamic dictatorship. Launching a real Green Revolution in America would be the best way to support the “Green Revolution” in Iran.

Oil is the magic potion that enables Iran’s turbaned shahs — “Shah Khamenei” and “Shah Ahmadinejad” — to snub their noses at the world and at many of their own people as well. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad behaves like someone who was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple. By coincidence, he’s been president of Iran during a period of record high oil prices. So, although he presides over an economy that makes nothing the world wants, he can lecture us about how the West is in decline and the Holocaust was a “myth.” Trust me, at $25 a barrel, he won’t be declaring that the Holocaust was a myth anymore.

The Obama team wants to pursue talks with Iran over its nuclear program, no matter who wins there. Fine. But the issue is not talk or no talk. The issue is leverage or no leverage. I love talking to people — especially in the Middle East — on one condition: that we have the leverage. As long as oil prices are high, Iran will have too much leverage and will be able to resist concessions on its nuclear program. With oil at $70 a barrel, our economic sanctions on Iran are an annoyance; at $25, they really hurt.

“People do not change when you tell them they should; they change when they tell themselves they must,” observed Michael Mandelbaum, the Johns Hopkins University foreign policy specialist. And nothing would tell Iran’s leaders that they must change more than collapsing oil prices.

Mr. Obama has already started some excellent energy-saving initiatives. But we need more. Imposing an immediate “Freedom Tax” of $1 a gallon on gasoline — with rebates to the poor and elderly — would be a triple positive: It would stimulate more investment in renewable energy now; it would stimulate more consumer demand for the energy-efficient vehicles that the reborn General Motors and Chrysler are supposed to make; and, it would reduce our oil imports in a way that would surely affect the global price and weaken every petro-dictator.

That is how — as Bill Maher likes to say — we make the bad guys “fight all of us.”

Sure, it would take time to influence the regime, but, unlike words alone, it will have an impact. I believe in “The First Law of Petro-Politics,” which stipulates that the price of oil and the pace of freedom in petrolist states — states totally dependent on oil exports to run their economies — operate in an inverse correlation. As the price of oil goes down, the pace of freedom goes up because leaders have to educate and unleash their people to innovate and trade. As the price of oil goes up, the pace of freedom goes down because leaders just have to stick a pipe in the ground to stay in power.

Exhibit A: the Soviet Union. High oil prices in the 1970s suckered the Kremlin into propping up inefficient industries, overextending subsidies, postponing real economic reforms and invading Afghanistan. When oil prices collapsed to $15 a barrel in the late 1980s, the overextended, petrified Soviet Empire went bust.

In a 2006 speech entitled “The Collapse of an Empire: Lessons for Modern Russia,” Yegor Gaidar, a deputy prime minister of Russia in the early 1990s, noted that “the timeline of the collapse of the Soviet Union can be traced to Sept. 13, 1985. On this date, Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the minister of oil of Saudi Arabia, declared that the monarchy had decided to alter its oil policy radically. The Saudis stopped protecting oil prices, and Saudi Arabia quickly regained its share in the world market.

“During the next six months,” added Gaidar, “oil production in Saudi Arabia increased fourfold, while oil prices collapsed by approximately the same amount in real terms. As a result, the Soviet Union lost approximately $20 billion per year, money without which the country simply could not survive.”

If we could bring down the price of oil, the Islamic Republic — which has been buying off its people with subsidies and jobs for years — would face the same pressures. The ayatollahs would either have to start taking subsidies away from Iranians, which would only make the turbaned shahs more unpopular, or empower Iran’s human talent — men and women — and give them free access to the learning, science, trade and collaboration with the rest of the world that would enable this once great Persian civilization to thrive without oil.

Let’s get serious: An American Green Revolution to end our oil addiction — to parallel Iran’s Green Revolution to end its theocracy — helps us, helps them and raises the odds that whoever wins the contest for power, there will have to be a reformer. What are we waiting for?

And now here’s Mr. Cohen, from Tehran:

Iran’s 1979 revolution took a full year to gestate. The uprising of 2009 has now ended its first phase. But the volatility ushered in by the June 12 ballot-box putsch of Iran’s New Right is certain to endure over the coming year. The Islamic Republic has been weakened.

During one of the violent clashes here in recent days, I saw a member of the riot police confront a protester holding a cell phone. “Don’t take a photograph of me!” he yelled at the young man.

“Why?” the man shouted back. “You’re not naked.”

But the Islamic Republic is. Everyone knows where everyone stands; it isn’t pretty. All the fudge that allowed a modern society to coexist with a theocracy inspired by an imam occulted in the 9th century has been swept away, leaving two Irans at war.

One of those Irans, embodied in the 12-member Guardian Council, the highest legal body, ruled in a preliminary statement on Tuesday that “no major fraud” had occurred in the vote and that its annulment was therefore impossible. Not much surprise there, in that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, made clear last week that the recount was a waste of time.

Of course, the definition of “major” is up for debate. Khamenei himself said rigging one million votes might be feasible, and the council found irregularities with three million votes.

But numbers have ceased to mean anything here. All the evidence is that percentages were simply allotted to each candidate and the votes cast backward-engineered from there. The Interior Ministry took 10 days to divulge results for all provinces. Such engineering takes time.

Iran has squandered a huge opportunity to bridge the gulf between the regime and an increasingly sophisticated population thirsting for greater freedom. A vibrant election campaign opened a door. It has been slammed shut.

“The Islamic Republic is the flag-bearer of human rights,” Khamenei declared in his Friday sermon. Over the past week, it has looked more like a flag-bearing police state.

True, the regime has not opened fire Tiananmen Square-style on the millions who have taken to the streets. I don’t believe it has the unity to do that. Significant cracks have emerged within the establishment, certainly the largest since the bloody first couple of years after the revolution. Relentless official attacks on foreign agents as the instigators of unrest have not papered over these divisions.

As the Association of Combatant Clergy, which represents more liberal mullahs in Qom, said in a statement: “What sane mind believes that a peaceful movement of millions of informed people — including workers, shopkeepers, farmers, students, clergy and others — could be agents of a so-called enemy?”

I said the Islamic Republic has been weakened. Why? I see five principal factors. The first is that the supreme leader’s post — the apex of the structure conceived by the revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini — has been undermined. The keystone of the arch is now loose.

Khamenei, far from an arbiter with a Prophet-like authority, has looked more like a ruthless infighter. His word has been defied. At night, from rooftops, I’ve even heard people call for his death. The unthinkable has occurred.

The second is that the hypocritical but effective contract that bound society has been broken. The regime never had active support from more than 20 percent of the population. But acquiescence was secured by using only highly targeted repression (leaving the majority free to go about its business), and by giving people a vote for the president every four years.

That’s over. Repression will be broad and ferocious in the coming months. The acquiescent have already become the angry. You can’t turn Iran into Burma: The resistance of a society this varied and savvy will be fierce.

The third is that a faction loyal to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, fiercely nationalistic and mystically religious, has made a power grab so bold that fissures in the establishment have become canyons.

Members of this faction include Hassan Taeb, the leader of the Basiji militia; Saeed Jalili, the head of the National Security Council and chief nuclear negotiator; and Mojtaba Khamenei, the reclusive but influential son of the supreme leader.

They have their way for now, but the cost to Iran has been immense, and the rearguard action led by Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a father of the revolution, and Mir Hussein Moussavi, the opposition leader, will be intense.

The fourth is that Iran’s international rhetoric, effective in Ahmadinejad’s first term, will be far less so now. Every time he talks of justice and ethics, his two favorite words, video will roll of Neda Agha Soltan’s murder and the regime’s truncheon-wielding goons at work. The president may prove too much of a liability to preserve.

The fifth is that, at the very peak of its post-revolution population boom, the regime has lost a whole new generation — and particularly the women of that generation — by failing to adapt.

Thirty years from the revolution, the core question of this election was: Must Iran stand apart from the forces of economic and political globalization in order to preserve its Islamic theocracy?

Or is it confident enough of its Islamic identity, and its now firmly established independence from America, to trash the nest-of-spies vitriol and an ultimately self-defeating isolation?

The answer has been devastating.